Research News

Grant will support study of engineering club for girls

By HALEY CASE

“Kids are taught how to not fail, but failing is actually really important in engineering. You can learn through failure.”

Mary McVee, professor of literacy education and director

Center for Literacy and Reading Instruction

Occupational projections show a clear trend: Good jobs in STEM
professions — those in the science, technology, engineering
and mathematics fields — will rise significantly in the next
five to 10 years. Yet, according to a congressional committee, only
14 percent of existing engineering jobs are filled by women.

Now, a grant from UB’s Institute for Research and
Education on Women and Gender will help UB researchers examine
girls’ opportunities to learn as part of an engineering
club.

Researchers from UB’s Center for Literacy and Reading
Instruction (CLaRI) will take a closer look at gender in an
after-school engineering club that began in 2014 with third-grade
students at Heritage Heights Elementary in the Sweet Home School
District.

The engineering club is still going strong, says Mary McVee,
professor of literacy education and director of CLaRI.

“I heard from teachers that the first question the now
fifth-grade students asked when they returned from summer break
was, ‘When does engineering club start again?’”
says McVee. “We’ve had very positive
feedback.”

McVee and her co-investigators on the grant — Lynn
Shanahan, associate professor of literacy, and Ken English, deputy
director of the Community of Excellence in Sustainable
Manufacturing and Advanced Robotics Technologies (SMART) —
will evaluate why the Heritage Heights engineering club works so
well.

They will look at data that has been collected since the club
began, as well as new data to examine how girls approach
engineering. The UB researchers then will try to determine what
lessons other schools can learn from the Heritage Heights
club’s success.

The Heritage Heights engineering club, part of a project known
as DeVELOP STEM ETC (Designing Vital Engineering and Literacy
Oriented Practices in STEM for Elementary Teachers and Children),
focuses on increasing interest in engineering in under-represented
populations, specifically girls and English language learners.

The project also investigates the intersection of the
engineering design process and disciplinary literacies.
Disciplinary literacies look at how each discipline, such as
engineering, has its own way of communicating, both verbally and
non-verbally.

The engineering club provides McVee and her colleagues with the
opportunity to study the behavior and engagement of elementary
students and compare it to existing research on how girls view STEM
subjects. Girls’ attitudes and interests in math and science,
for example, tend to remain similar to boys during elementary
school, according to McVee. But girls’ interest in
STEM-related subjects starts to wane during middle school.

Understanding opportunities to learn within an engineering club
may help provide insights into getting girls engaged in the
engineering process, building interest in STEM subjects and
encouraging them to enter STEM fields.

Among other things, children in the Heritage Heights engineering
club are taught that failure is not necessarily a bad thing.

“In school, we are taught that there is only right and
wrong, and we become less willing to take risks,” says McVee.
“Kids are taught how to not fail, but failing is actually
really important in engineering. You can learn through
failure.”

The engineering club began engaging students in the third grade,
an age when young learners were still willing and comfortable to
make mistakes, McVee says. The students were open to learning new
ways of thinking and communicating.

The club gives students the chance to be problem-solvers and
think and talk like engineers. The “disciplinary
literacy” aspect — where students learn a way of
communicating distinct to their area of training — is
particularly important, according to McVee.

Even students who are still developing English language skills
have been able to fully participate, she says. The club encourages
communication through language, but also through the non-verbal
means practiced by engineers, such as sketching or developing
working models. Their non-verbal skills show how they want to solve
a problem.

“Focusing on language-in-use — for example, reading,
writing and talking like an engineer — is a critical goal for
disciplinary literacy. But an additional goal must be to develop
students into insiders so they feel a sense of agency,” says
Shanahan. “Feeling like an insider with discipline-specific
practices — like engineering — is crucial for
underrepresented minorities and girls so that they have the
opportunity to create engineering identities and habits of
mind.”

Another critical element of the engineering club is the chance
to engage in teamwork and communication, referred to as “soft
skills.”

“Many people believe that engineering is only about math
or science, creating technology for technology’s
sake. In practice, much of engineering is about collaborative
problem-solving,” English says. “Engineers work with
diverse groups to identify problems, collaborate in teams to
develop solutions, and need to effectively communicate these
solutions to the people who are going to produce and use the
designs.”